The rapid scale-up of opto-electronic components, as well as the difficulties of manufacturing of opto-electronic components in high volumes, have been recognized as a key challenge in meeting the anticipated demand for high-bandwidth telecommunication equipment. Currently, active opto-electronic modules such as 10 Gb/s laser transmitters and receivers are produced in so-called “butterfly packages.” Butterfly packages allow the incorporation of many features, but they are bulky and are also expensive to manufacture because their assembly is difficult to automate and many assembly functions must be performed by hand.
To reduce the cost and ease the automated assembly, the industry is today adopting a new packaging standard known as a TO (Transistor Outline) can package leveraged from existing technology from lower data rate (1-2 Gbs) equipment. While it offers some improvements over the butterfly package, when applied to high-bandwidth equipment this new TO can packaging is suffering from several performance and functional limitations like high optical coupling efficiency and low thermal cooling capability.